Congressman Pat Meehan: Cyber attacks a growing threat to U.S.

If you’ve been unable to access your bank account online recently, it may not be the fault of your Internet provider. Instead, your bank could be under cyber attack.

There’s been an onslaught of cyber attacks on U.S. banks in recent months, and it must sound the alarm to Congress and the American people that cyber security is an urgent national security priority. Cyber attacks come from diverse sources, from thieves attempting to steal individual identities and bank accounts, to large-scale disruptions caused by “hacktivists” - terrorist networks and nation-states conducting 21st-century espionage and warfare.

The recent attacks on U.S. banks are linked to Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a hacking group that appears to be working with the Iranian government. These attacks, which have shut down or disrupted access to many sites, including Citigroup, PNC, and Capital One, are unprecedented. They also have public officials, national security leaders, and cyber-security experts asking, what’s next?

U.S. security officials like James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, have been warning of Iran’s growing cyber capabilities for more than a year. Indeed, at a joint subcommittee hearing that I cochaired last April, the director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University warned that “there is little, if any, reason to think that Iran would hesitate to engage proxies to conduct cyber strikes against perceived adversaries.”

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The threat to our bank accounts is just one front in this cyber conflict. Others include air-traffic and rail-control systems, the electrical grid, water systems, power plants, wireless networks, and our defense-industrial base. If it runs on computers and computer networks, it’s a potential target.

Last summer, two major Middle East energy companies had critical business information erased and 30,000 computers destroyed in a cyber attack. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called the attack a “significant escalation of the cyber threat.” Instead of a Saudi oil company, imagine that next time it’s Bank of America or your mutual fund manager, and the data are your account balances. That makes the threat very real.

The subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies will be crafting a national strategy aimed at preventing attacks on American families and their bank accounts, health records, identities, and more. We must secure the critical infrastructure that keeps the phones, lights, and water on.

We will work with government, the business community, and privacy advocates to safeguard our computer networks and our liberty. We must foster an environment that builds trust and focuses on disseminating threat information to the front lines - in this case, our private-sector cyber networks. At the same time, we must ensure that no one mistakes the common cause of securing our homeland for authority to violate the civil liberties of Americans.

In the coming months, our subcommittee will look at security practices that work, those that don’t, and ways to spread successes across the platform. In the process, we must avoid the combative political rhetoric that plagued previous attempts to address the threat. Action is the next step, and the clock is ticking.

U.S. Rep. Pat Meehan is a Republican who represents Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District, which includes portions of Delaware, Montgomery, Chester, Berks and Lancaster counties. Meehan is chairman of the House subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies.